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Sunday, June 16, 2013

`Tableau Vivant if You Will'

An old
woman collects wildflowers, yellow ones, and finds a dead man. With Beckett,
minute points of grammar and word choice assume unaccustomed importance. He begins:
“He was found lying on the ground.” Why the passive voice? Because a corpse is by
definition incapable of activity? Then: “No one had missed him.” In Indiana
thirty years ago, police found the body of a dead man in a field, in a “state
of advanced decomposition,” as they say, and he was never identified. At the
scene I thought of “The Groundhog”: “His form began its senseless change.” The
police found “no evidence of foul play.” Death invites the soothing cliché. This
was an anonymous death capping what remains, to my knowledge, an anonymous
life.

But “One Evening” (Samuel Beckett: The Complete
Short Prose, 1995) is the old woman’s story, not the corpse’s. She knows death
and seems unmoved by her discovery of the body: “She is wearing the black she
took on when widowed young. It is to reflower the grave she strays in search of
the flowers he had loved.” In his biography, Anthony Cronin tells us the corpse,
in his green coat with mismatched buttons, suggests Beckett’s father and “the essential
isolation and pathos Sam conferred on him.” We don’t need to know that. Beckett
writes:

“The old
sunlit face. Tableau vivant if you will. In its way. All is silent from now on.
For as long as she cannot move. The sun disappears at least and with it all
shadow. All shadow here. Slow fade of afterglow. Night without moon or stars.
All that seems to hang together. But no more about it.”

That’s how
the fragment, published posthumously, concludes. Beckett discarded it as
part of a longer work published in 1981 as Ill
Seen Ill Said, which concludes:

“First
last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment.
Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick
chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void.
Know happiness.”